Peter Carey - Amnesia

Of course the fugitive was alarmed, but only very briefly. His greatest concern was that he would be compelled to drink inferior wine. So as the pumpkin exploded on the rocks he revealed his hand.

The boy saw the slippery money and was suddenly in a frantic hurry to get away. She’ll be right, mate, he said. Fridge, cooker, matches, gas, he continued. The old man came at him with his legal tender, red and orange like a bird-of-paradise flower.

Water, the boy cried, and turned the tap on and off.

You could do me a favour, the fugitive said, perhaps too desperately.

The boy held up his hands and pushed at the air between them. I’m fine, mate.

Could you get me a case of McLaren Vale shiraz, and drop it back.

I’m sorry.

I’ll make it worth your while.

I’m only sixteen.

Get your brother, anyone.

Mate, no, I can’t come back.

I’m not going to see you again?

That’s the idea, mate.

But someone else is going to come?

I couldn’t say.

Why not for Chrissake?

Couldn’t say.

Couldn’t bloody say?

Kero for the lamps, he said. My ride is here. I got to go.

Take a twenty anyway.

Good on you. Mate. Good luck and that.

And with that he was out and gone, tripping lightly down the stairs, leaping like a goat down the path, bounding so fast that the new resident, following him, bravely if not elegantly, arrived in time to see a tinny was in the process of nosing out of the mangroves.

Help, he called.

The sun glinted on the aluminium and broke into the shade. He removed his shoes and dropped his trousers and with his long jacket flapping in such a way as to make his sturdy white legs, his point of greatest physical insecurity, appear even shorter than normal, he set off beneath the mangroves, mud squelching obscenely around his urban toes.

And so it was that the “most controversial journalist of his generation” was abandoned, untrousered, like some creature in a Sidney Nolan painting ( The old man who was up bathing himself in the dam ) and he soon saw, through the light-netted mangrove leaves, another aluminium dinghy and a woman with long blonde hair, like Julie Christie, he imagined, or at least Celine as she set off to lead the revolution from the front ranks of the 1972 Melbourne Moratorium. Squatting he could see her, the tanned skin, the hair flying behind.

Fuck fuck fuck. He proceeded up the narrow track carrying his trousers, socks, his shoes, suddenly aware of how soft he had become, a frail old fellow pricked by sticks, stones, and those little stabbing bindi-eyes which he had thought existed only in suburban lawns.

Finally, standing at the open window, with his trousers still flung across his shoulder, he stretched his legs sufficiently to wash his feet in the sink. He managed to find a tumbler, open a wine cask, and pull out its wrinkled concertinaed genitalia. Shuddering, he poured a purple glassful and then found, in the small gas refrigerator, a lump of cheddar the size of a house brick. He cut himself a slice, and was about to taste it when, with a great rush of winds, a fucking kookaburra arrived from nowhere, took his cheese in its bucket beak, and flew out the door.

He remained then at the sink, for a long time, looking balefully out through the foliage to the blue glint of the water. He accustomed himself to the wine. He was a highly specialised creature, he thought, sometimes, on a good day, capable of a single function, not much more.

He dried his feet with his trousers and laid them carefully in a parallelogram of sunshine beside the desk. He then wound a single sheet of paper into the Valentine and found it far from blank.

To Mr. Felix Moore, posing as a radical, it read, and continued thus: We know exactly what you did and did not do in 1975. Wouldn’t your fans and readers be shocked to discover their great radical didn’t have the balls. You were just like our parents: down on the ground crying how unfair it was.

The roller of the Olivetti turned, thus revealing:

It won’t help us to reveal your sad moral failure, but it would help you to honour the gift you have here been given. This woman is a human being and it will be your honour to celebrate her real life without hysteria.

Celebrate her real life without hysteria . Celine Baillieux had used these words in Moroni’s.

All you need is to be humble, the note continued. If you can manage this we, her friends, have the ability to publish you digitally around the world. We are legion. Ten million readers are now within your reach.

Yes, right. He twisted the corner of his wine-stained lips and began to bash the keys. His fingers hurt like hell but he would not dishonour her by being her hagiographer. He would write or overwrite until he bled. Go celebrate your arse, he thought. Ten million readers. Bullshit.

MANY HAWKESBURY MORNINGS had now passed. As this new one began, a grey lizard, aka a skink, a member of the family Scincidae, a nervous neckless creature with tiny legs, made its cautious way up the pitted trunk of the angophora and stopped, still half in the night. A butcherbird sang like Ornette Coleman, fluffed out its untidy chest, and shat. The windows were filled with smudgy dawn but the voices of two women could be heard, sometimes in unison, sometimes in discord, then in lone confession, and this variation was emphasised or diminished by the man in puffy overalls, who sat on the edge of his desk or kitchen table, using a large discoloured toe to raise and lower the volumes of two quite different tape recorders.

The river was opaque, a greenish grey. The crack of a whipbird cut through the human voices. The magpies and lorikeets and king parrots added their calls and the pink early sun, finally, revealed the awful hairy glory of the fugitive.

The “most controversial journalist of his age” would have thought it pathetic to grow a beard deliberately, but the razor had been left on the top of the beam above his bed and now he had discovered it … well, too late. He had a “sort of” beard and it had shocked him to see its reflection in a spoon, his sensual mouth all hidden, leaving just the fleshy nose and his creased and pitted bark. He looked a hundred.

The women were still speaking, as they had done for days, and he let them go together, waiting for … he did not know. Of 1975, not one single word, no rage, no pity, no word about revenge. He no longer cared. He had received so many different instructions on how to tell the story, the only sane thing was to let it show itself, to wait until it crept out of its hole. Sometimes he was very patient. Sometimes he hated the women, sometimes he was amused by how often they agreed with the person they complained of. If they had been butcherbirds they might have almost qualified, in spite of all their acknowledged opposition, as a “bonded pair.”

Sometimes he reported their comments. Almost always he “fixed them up” and oftentimes he distilled Gaby’s slang into something more worthy of the ideas she was expressing. Would you trust a woman who spoke of “lossitude”?

In the Supreme Court of New South Wales the judge had asked him did he make up quotes.

He admitted freely that he not only made up quotes but had also been accused of making up quotes, “but never of the quotes I actually made up.”

When they did not laugh, he attempted a quick lesson in the nature of dialogue, explaining how the actual words themselves were far less important than was generally thought by laymen. It was more accurate, he said, to understand the spoken word as the product of the tectonic forces working below the surface of the human drama. It was these forces (none other than the insistence of a character’s greed, love, ambition, etc.) which were important. It was these forces which the writer had to know. It was as a result of them banging against each other that the dialogue emerged.